[Bill Wells]

tinker...

mulve wasnt trounced, he whined about a 7 yr old car as if his problem was a widespread catastrophic problem. egads, anything can break but dont jump to conclusions.

re exhaust hanger breaking : yep, that problem has occurred sporadically, the mounts between different series of cars differed in design and application. mine are trouble free and are different than many of the newer cars. but its time may come sometime too; how do ya know ? hey, mine is 7 yrs old too ! i recently changed egines with a hotter more radical cam and a lot more engine rocking and rolling at idle now and my sidepipes are dancing in their hangers much more than they did before, thus adding much more strain than before. so who knows.

sometimes the cause might be the hanger/bracket itself or the torque twist rotation of the engine within its mounts or vibration causing strain on the hanger which has less rotation ability or resilicency . some engines rotate more than others depending on mounts or who installed the package. some headers come thru the fenders too close to the bottom or the top cuz the engine has not been properly shimmed when installed so side pipes get stressed at brackets. no known pattern there either. some sidepipes may have been installed differently too by the installer. i have seen several different styles of side bracket hangers on over 70 spfs i have looked at, slight variability between some of them in mounting or construction.

no known breakage pattern to any specific serial ranges that i am aware of , or bb / sb influences. some have broken , most did not. some on one side only, some on both. some more than once ( depends on who did the repair). i have seen this on other brand cars too btw but admittedly have seen several on spf's.

easy fix as you have discovered, sometimes just adding some bar stock to the bottom can do it or reweld and reinforcing of existing break as long as the surrounding area is not harmed / weakened by the reweld. some are fixed in place without removal of the side pipes and some folks removed them to fix em. any alignment issues when rewelded need to be addressed so any flex/rotation/pressure issues are resolved, ie, less stress on the repair if possible than existed before.

i guess anything can happen to any of these cars...just gotta take it in stride and hope it is not life threatening. bill.